Saturday, October 13, 2007

food + safe

After spending the first sunny Saturday in weeks cooped up in the church basement, I know at least a dozen new ways to make people dreadfully ill (or possibly dead) just by cooking or serving them some food or even washing their dishes in specifically careless ways. I also have my Food Safe Certificate.

The course was very interesting, and fun in a gruesomely cautionary kind of way. It was very nice to be able to do it in the familiar setting of our church. The son of one of our church members instructed, and lots of good people participated, including several teens and a handful of people from a neighbouring church. I always find people's questions and comments very interesting in these group learning situations, and there were videos of clueless food service workers bumbling into disaster with ill-informed food handling practices. Even better, the course has been revamped to include modules of "Work Safe" for food service workers, so I discovered new and unusual ways to get injured or ill on the job in a restaurant. All in all, the day was a delicious feast for a people-enjoying lover of dark humour like me, AND I got my certificate.

When I was in university I worked as a server in a restaurant, but that was pre-Food Safe, so the hardest learning I had to do was to memorize portion sizes, main ingredients and cocktail recipes so I could answer customers' questions and make menu suggestions. I remember if you were bad the manager would make you take a pop quiz on these topics, but I must have been good because once I finished training I never did (have to take a quiz that is). If you were good, the manager bought you a drink or an appie at the end of the shift, and we got beer for about a buck a bottle (staff beer it was called). On Saturdays we'd order pizza delivered from another restaurant to our restaurant and sit in the lounge watching Saturday Night Live on the bar TV. (That was also when Saturday Night Live was actually funny.) As far as I can remember, we never injured ourselves or poisoned our customers, so that was good too.

question: is your food safe?

mompoet - vaguely suspicious of lettuce but I'll still eat it

ps. yes, I did graduate from university before Expo 86 - some time before that